[GOAL] [SCHOLCOMM] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?

[Rick Anderson]

Thanks very much for sharing these notes and the blog post, Danny. A couple of comments:

1. I think it’s interesting that plagiarism keeps being raised as a CC BY issue, since plagiarism is not a reuse issue but rather an attribution issue — it’s pretending that you wrote something someone else did. Those who raise it in the context of CC BY probably don’t understand (or aren’t thinking clearly about) the very important difference between plagiarism and piracy.

2. One issue that (as far as I can see from the notes) doesn’t seem to have gotten the attention it deserves is that of mandates. The pros and cons of CC BY are very important to understand and discuss, but so is the question of the degree to which adopting CC BY for one’s work ought to be a condition of receiving research funding, or of graduation, or of employment. This latter issue is getting much less discussion, unfortunately, than the implications of CC BY itself. Speaking personally, I think CC BY is wonderful and I’m very glad that it’s available as an option to authors. I’m much less comfortable with making it mandatory.

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu

From: <scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org<mailto:scholcomm-request at lists.ala.org>> on behalf of Danny Kingsley
Organization: University of Cambridge
Reply-To: Danny Kingsley
Date: Thursday, March 3, 2016 at 5:11 AM
To: "lib-list at lists.cam.ac.uk<mailto:lib-list at lists.cam.ac.uk>", "lib-staff at lists.cam.ac.uk<mailto:lib-staff at lists.cam.ac.uk>", "goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>", "UKCORR-DISCUSSION at JISCMAIL.AC.UK<mailto:UKCORR-DISCUSSION at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>", SCHOLCOMM
Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] BLOG: Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows?

<Apologies for cross posting>

Dear all,

You might be interested in the outcomes of a roundtable discussion held at Cambridge University earlier this week on the topic of Creative Commons Attribution licences.

Is CC-BY really a problem or are we boxing shadows? https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=555

A taster:
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Comments from researchers and colleagues have indicated some disquiet about the Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence in some areas of the academic community. However, in conversation with some legal people and contemporaries at other institutions one of the observations was that generally academics are not necessarily cognizant with what the licences offer and indeed what protections are available under regular copyright.

To try and determine whether this was an education and advocacy problem or if there are real issues we had a roundtable discussion on 29 February at Cambridge University attended by about 35 people who were a mixture of academics, administrators, publishers and legal practitioners.

In summary, the discussion indicated that CC-BY licences do not encourage plagiarism, or issues with commercialism within academia (although there is a broader ethical issue). However in some cases CC-BY licences could pose problems for the moral integrity of the work and cause issues with translations. CC-BY licenses do create challenges for works containing sensitive information and for works containing third party copyright.

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Please feel free to comment on the list. Due to a serious spam problem with the blog, comments sent to the blog are being buried (we are working on this).

Thanks

Danny

--
Dr Danny Kingsley
Head of Scholarly Communications
Cambridge University Library
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